The scarlet fever prevailed generally in the year 1764. It resembled the same disease, as described by Dr. Sydenham, in not being accompanied by a sore throat.
Death from convulsions in pregnant women, also front parturition, and the puerperile fever, were common between the years 1760 and 1766. Death was likewise common between the 50th and 60th years of life from gout, apoplexy, palsy, obstructed livers, and dropsies. A club, consisting of about a dozen of the first gentlemen in the city, all paid, for their intemperance, the forfeit of their lives between those ages, and most of them with some one, or more of the diseases that have been mentioned. I sat up with one of that club on the night of his death. Several of the members of it called at his house, the evening before he died, to inquire how he was. One of them, upon being informed of his extreme danger, spoke in high and pathetic terms of his convivial talents and virtues, and said, “he had spent 200 evenings a year with him, for the last twenty years of his life.” These evenings were all spent at public houses.
The colica pictonum, or dry gripes, was formerly a common disease in this city. It was sometimes followed by a palsy of the upper and lower extremities. Colics from crapulas were likewise very frequent, and now and then terminated in death.
Many children died of the cholera infantum, cynanche trachealis, and hydrocephalus internus. The last disease was generally ascribed to worms.
Fifteen or twenty deaths occurred, every summer, from drinking cold pump water, when the body was in a highly excitable state, from great beat and labour.
The small-pox, within the period alluded to, was sometimes epidemic, and carried off many citizens. In the year 1759, Dr. Barnet was invited from Elizabeth-town, in New-Jersey, to Philadelphia, to inoculate for the small-pox. The practice, though much opposed, soon became general. About that time, Dr. Redman published a short defence of it, and recommended the practice to his fellow-citizens in the most affectionate language. The success of inoculation was far from being universal. Subsequent improvements in the mode of preparing the body, and treating the eruptive fever, have led us to ascribe this want of success to the deep wound made in the arm, to the excessive quantity of mercury given to prepare the body, and to the use of a warm regimen in the eruptive fever.
The peculiar customs and the diseases which have been enumerated, by inducing general weakness, rendered the pulmonary consumption a frequent disease among both sexes.
Pains and diseases from decayed teeth were very common, between the years 1760 and 1766. At that time, the profession of a dentist was unknown in the city.
The practice of physic and surgery were united, during those years, in the same persons, and physicians were seldom employed as man-midwives, except in preternatural and tedious labours.
The practice of surgery was regulated by Mr. Sharp's treatise upon that branch of medicine.